"I wasn't talking about you," Erwin replied. "What you did--"
"was wrong. I know that. We made a terrible error, and I'll regret it forever. But we did it because we thought we had to."
"And how did your precious community treat you when they realized you'd screwed up? Like pariahs, right?" The other man said nothing. "So much for the community," Erwin said.
they did not speak again until they reached the gates of Potter's Cemetery, when Dolan said, "Do you know who Hubert Nordhoff is?"
"Didn't his family own the mill?"
"A lot more than the mill. He was a great man hereabouts, for fifty years."
"So what about him?"
"He holds court on the last Friday of every month."
"Here?" Erwin said, peering through the ironwork gate into the cemetery. There was a thin veil of clouds covering the moon, but it was light enough to see the graves laid out ahead. Here and there a carved angel or an um marked the resting place of a family with money to waste, but most of the tombs were simple stones.
"Yes, here," said Erwin, and led him inside.
There was an ancient, moss-covered oak at the far end of the cemetery, and there, under its titanic branches, was an assembly of six men and a woman. Some lounged on stones; one-a fellow who looked sickly even for a dead soul-sitting on the lowest of the branches. And standing close to the trunk of the tree, presently addressing the group, was a man in his seventies, his dress, his spectacles, and his somewhat formal manner suggesting he had lived and died in a earlier age. Erwin did not need Dolan whispering in his ear to know that this was the aforementioned Hubert Nordhoff. He was presently in full and rhetorical flight.
"Are we unloved? My friends, we are. Are we forgotten? By all but a few, I'm afraid so. And do we care? My friends, do we care?" He let his sharp blue gaze rest on every one of his congregation before he answered, "Oh my Lord, ves. to the bottom of our broken hearts, we care." He stopped here, looking past his audience towards Dolan and Erwin. He inclined his head.
"Mr. Dolan," he said. "Mr. Nordhoff." Dolan turned towards Erwin.
"This is the guy I was telling you about earlier. His name's-"
"Toothaker," Erwin said, determined not to enter this circle as Dolan's catch, but as a free-willed individual. "Erwin Toothaker."
"We're pleased to see you, Mr. Toothaker," the old man said, "I'm Hubert Nordhoff. And this... " he took Erwin round the group, introducing them all. Three of the names were familiar to Erwin. they were the members of families still prominent in Everville (one was a Gilholly; another the father of a former mayor). The others were new to him, though it was apparent by their postmortem finery that none had been disenfranchised in life. Like Hubert, these were men who'd had some significant place in the community. There was only one surprise: that the single female in this group was not a woman at all, but one Cornelius Floyd, who had apparently been delivered into the afterlife in rather dowdy drag, and seemed quite happy with his lot. His features were too broad and his jaw too square to be called feminine, but he effected a light, breathy tone when telling Erwin that though his name was indeed Comelius, everybody called him Connie.
With the introductions over, Hubert got down to business. "We heard what happened to you," he said. "You were murdered, we understand, in your own house."
"Yes, that's right."
"We're of course appalled." There were suitably sympathetic murmurs all around the circle. "But I regret to say not terribly surprised. This is increasingly the way of the world."
"It wasn't a normal murder," Erwin pointed out, "if any murder's normal." "Dolan mentioned something about vampires," Gilholly the Elder said.
"His word, not mine," Erwin pointed out. "I got the life sucked out of me, but there was none of that neck-biting nonsense."
"Did you know the killer?" asked a portly fellow called Dickerson, who was presently recumbent on the top of a tomb. "Not exactly." "Meaning?" "I met him down by Unger's Creek. His name was Fletcher. I think he fancies himself some kind of messiah."
"That's all we need," said the scrawny guy in the tree. "What do we do about this, Nordhoff7" Gilholly wanted to know.
"There's nothing we can do," Erwin said.
"Don't be defeatist," Nordhoff snapped. "We have responsibilities."
"It's true," said Connie. "If we don't act, who will?"
"Act to do what?" said Erwin.
"to save our heritage," Nordhoff replied. "We're the men who made this city. We poured our sweat into taining this wilderness and our geniuses into building a decent place to raise our families. Now it's all coming apart. We've suspected it for months now. Seen little signs of it everywhere. And now you come along, murdered by something unnatural, and the Lundy boy, raped in Dolan's store by something else, equally unnatural-"
"Don't forget the bees," Dickerson put in.
"What bees?" Erwin said.
"Do you know Frank Tibbit?" Dickerson said, "Lives off Moon Lane?"
"No, I can't say-"
"He keeps bees. Or rather he did. they all took off ten days ago."
"Is that significant?" Erwin said.
"Not if it were a solitary case," Nordhoff said. "But it isn't. We watch, you see, and we listen. It's our business to preserve what we made, even if we've been forgotten. So we hear everything that goes on, sooner or later. And there are dozens of examples-"
"Hundreds," said Connie.
"Many dozens, certainly," Nordhoff said, "many dozens of examples of strange goings-on, none of them of any -reater scale than Tibbit's bees-"
"Barring your murder," Dickerson put in.
"Is it possible I could finish a sentence without being interrupted?" Nordhoff said.
"Maybe if you weren't so long-winded about it," said Melvin Pollock, who looked to be at least Nordhoff s age, and had the long, drawn dour mouth of one who'd died an unrepentant curmudgeon. "What he's trying to say is this: We invested our lives in Everville. The signs tell us we're about to lose that investment forever."
"And when it's gone-" Dickerson said.
"We go with it," Pollock said. "Into oblivion."
"Just because we're dead," Nordhoff said, "it doesn't mean we have to take this lying down."
Dickerson chuckled. "Not bad, Hubert. We'll make a comedian of you yet."
"This isn't a laughing matter," Nordhoff said.
"Oh but it is," Dickerson said, heaving his bulk into a sitting position. "Here we are, the great and the good of Everville, a banker"-he nodded in Pollock's direction. "A real-estate broker." At Connie now. "A mill owner." Nordhoff, of course. "And the rest of us all movers and shakers. Here we are, holding on to our dignity as best we can, and thinking we've got a hope in hell of influencing what goes on out there"-he pointed through the gate, into the world of the living-"when it's perfectly obvious to anyone with eyes in his head that it's over."
"What's over'?" said Connie.
"Our time. Everville's time. Maybe He paused, frowned. "Maybe humanity's time," he murmured.
There was silence now, even from Nordhoff. Somewhere in the streets outside the cemetery, a dog barked, but even that most familiar of sounds carried no comfort.
At last, Erwin said, "Fletcher knows."
"Knows what?" said Nordhoff.
"What's going on. Maybe he's even the reason for it. Maybe if we could find some way to kill him-"
"It's a thought," said Connie.